ILOM: Exadata ILOM (Integrated Lights Out Manager) is an adaptor card in addition to the management network interface (NET0) in each storage server and database server. ILOM boots as soon as the server power is up and operates independently of OS allowing web and SSh access. The ILOM allows the DBA to perform many management tasks remotely otherwise require physical access to the server including Console access, power up, power down systems, re-booting servers etc. ILOM is capable to monitor the H/W functioning and report if there is a failure. ILOM is linked to the management switch using a Ethernet port.

Oracle Exadata documentation is available at /usr/share/doc/oracle/Exadata in all storage servers and not available publically.

In each storage node there are 4 PCI solid state flash modules (Fmods – F20 cards) each sizing 32GB, but 22.875 GB usable storage. Each Fmods contain 64MB controller Ram (volatile) memory and eight 4GB SLC NAND components. The 64MB RAM is powered by a ESM (Energy Storage Module) using a capacitor to avoid data corruption by sudden power loss. This 64MB controller RAM buffers the data writes to the Flash module and will write directly to the SLC NAND if ESM is not functional which will cause reduced I/O performance. The IOLM (Integrated Lights Out manager) module monitors the ESM and send warnings if there are any issues

The PCI Flash memory can be used in two ways – as intermediate cache to store data (Smart Flash Cache) to speed up the random access reads or define as SSD (Solid State Disks) under ASM to store the database files.

Exadata Smart Flash Cache: Is ultra performance Flash Cache built on PCI flash cards directly attached to the high speed PCI bus. The Exadata smart flash cache automatically caches frequently accessed data in the flash cache. In addition to automatic caching, DBA can specify to cache tables and indexes explicitly. The table creation option KEEP will place the object in the cache while NONE will avoid using cache and DEFAULT will leads oracle to take a decision to cache the data or not. You can check the object status in cache using

Use ARCHIVEDLOGFORMATS with TRANLOGOPTIONS to configure alternate location for archive logs for GG. You can configure multiple archive log locations; so that the extract will continue to mine even if the archive log files are moved to non-default secondary location. PRIMARY keyword will skip the DEFAULT log location and will look for log files in the specified path.